As you may have spotted, this week’s Home Learning is to practise making alien words with your child. I’m sure this seems rather odd when many children are still learning to write basic words however the Year One Phonics Screening Check is 50% alien (or Pseudo) words as well as the real words.

Why teach alien words?

Pupils who can read pseudo words should have the skills to decode almost any unfamiliar word. The Government’s evaluation showed that pupils generally enjoyed the pseudo words. Of course, it is important that children understand the difference between real words and pseudo words.

Here are some examples to help you at home.

During numeracy this week, we will be focusing on number bonds to 10, for example

7 and 3

6 and 4

It is very important for children to be secure in their number bonds to ten, it is the foundation for fantastic counting with harder numbers further through the school.

In literacy we will be adapting and creating our own version of the Hare and the Tortoise. For example Miss Shaw’s story is the cat and the mouse- the mouse beats the cat because the cat is too busy eating fish from the pond to notice!

We have really enjoyed the children’s maps they have created for homelearning too- so keep up the good work!

On Wednesday 16^th November, Year One went to visit the chapel at Oaklands Secondary School. The chaplain taught us some different ways to pray to God.

We wrote, danced, sang and acted out our prayers to God.

Click to enlarge

On Tuesday some of our Year Ones had the opportunity to take part in a football tournament at Southdowns college. They thoroughly enjoyed themselves, participating in various skills based games set up by the students at Southdowns. They will now be able to pass on their new skills to their peers.

Well done!

This week in Year One we have been making dinosaur bones out of Mod Roc. As we have been learning to measure length this week, we decided to use our skills to measure our new bones.

We arranged them in size order

This week, Year One had the privilege of helping open the secret garden. Mrs Daily and Mr Cunningham helped to cut the ribbon. We then had a fantastic maths lesson in our new learning space.

Thank you to everyone who celebrated the story of creation in our Liturgy on Tuesday. All the children enjoyed participating in creating the world through the words of the bible.

We are so impressed Turtles and Pufferfish, another week in and you have settled in so well, into Year One.

Your work has looked fantastic this week and your first books in school are starting to fill up! As you can imagine linking all of our learning this week to DINOSAURS has made learning very fun.

In maths we have been learning to count dinosaurs accurately, we have also been exploring our maths toolkits to see how many different ways we can make a number.

In literacy we have been reading Harry and his bucket full of dinosaurs, we have been writing descriptive sentences to describe what the dinosaurs look like to the lost and found man.

Our sounds in phonics this week have been EAR, AIR, URE, NG, OR.

Remember- this Tuesday, 27th September at 10:20 Year 1 will be leading a Liturgy in the school hall. We would love as many of you as possible to attend and join us in worship. If you are unable to attend, please look at the blog Tuesday evening for photos.

We are so excited with our new topic ‘Dinosaur Roar’ keep watching this space to see all our learning!

 We have been making fantastic use of our new and improved Mary garden. It has been a lovely place to learn one more and one less of a number.

We have been showing one more/one less than a number in a variety of ways as you can see in the pictures below.

In literacy this week we have created our own fact books about puffer fish and turtles, writing sentences focusing on finger spaces, capital letters and full stops.